THE GULAG BEAT GOES ON AND ON

Criminal justice: Right now, the troubling prison guards' union seems
nearly invincible.

Last Monday, after a poorly prepared prosecution and some curious decisions
by Superior Court Judge Louis Bissig, a Kings County jury found four
Corcoran State Prison guards innocent of charges that they had engineered
the rape of a prisoner, Eddie Dillard, by another inmate notorious for his
sexual predations.

This doesn't close the book on Corcoran. Upcoming in a U.S. district court
in Fresno is the prosecution of eight Corcoran guards on charges partly
arising out of the so-called "gladiator days" first reported by Mark Arax
in The Times, when guards would stage fights between inmates and from time
to time shoot dead one of the antagonists. Those who predicted the recent
acquittal in Kings County express similar reserve about the likelihood that
federal prosecutors will win a guilty verdict, not least because the
accused can argue that they were acting within Corcoran's policy guidelines.

An optimist could argue that though Corcoran's guards have never suffered
the sanction of a guilty verdict, the publicity and investigations have
improved the situation in Corcoran and probably in other prisons, too. The
wave of fatal shootings has subsided.

Pessimists can point to a series of probes sidetracked or deep-sixed by
state agencies, such as the Department of Corrections and the state
attorney general's office in the Dan Lungren era. All this surely
encourages prison guards to conclude that they are beyond sanction.

The guards' union--the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn.--has
come a long way since it won its representation election in 1980, amid the
first surge of the prison building boom. Back then it had 1,600 guards;
today, it has 28,000 guards, a $17-million budget, 17 staff attorneys and
huge political clout. When Greg Strickland, district attorney of Kings
County, prosecuted some Corcoran guards for the infamous "greet the bus"
incident (when new prisoners were beaten), the union put $30,000 behind his
opponent in the next election. Strickland went down.

Last July, Bill Lockyer, California's current attorney general, tried to
put through a bill giving his office power to police the prison system.
Lockyer told legislators that local district attorneys had admitted that
they dare not go up against the CCPOA. Lockyer found out what they were
talking about. His bill sailed through the state Senate, then sank in the
Assembly. Lockyer quoted one Assembly member, Jim Battin (R-La Quinta), who
later denied it, as saying: "I'm sorry, but I'm whoring for the CCPOA."
Battin got $105,000 from the guards union in the last four years.

Can anyone curb the power of the prison guards? Don't look to Gov. Gray
Davis. He collected an endorsement plus $2.3 million from the CCPOA for his
1998 campaign and more since. He's said thank you several times: He vetoed
a bill that would have shifted parole violators to community-based
programs, which would have lessened the need for prison guards; he vetoed a
bill rescinding the ban on journalists' interviewing inmates face to face,
and he narrowly failed in a bid to give the CCPOA $4 million in public
money for its legal defense fund.

So here we have the gulag paradigm. The "war on drugs" plus savage
sentencing laws engender an ever-bloating prison population, hence more
prison guards, whose increasingly powerful union presses for even stiffer
sentences and yet more prisons to provide yet more jobs--all this at a time
when the "lock 'em all up forever" hysteria is finally beginning to
subside. It will take a lot of political courage of the sort displayed by
Lockyer to stop that kind of malignant institutional momentum.